When he’d found a parking space in their street he tried to open the front door to the flat with his key, but Christine had pushed the bolt across. He rang the bell and seemed to sense her listening very close to him, on the other side of the door – he was sure he heard her breathing. He called her name in a low voice but didn’t knock, in case he woke their neighbours downstairs in the divided house – Chris would hate that. From the car he tried phoning but her mobile was turned off; she let the landline ring and didn’t answer it. A light was on in their first-floor sitting room, the blinds were drawn down: he thought he saw her shadow passing behind them and then the light went out, definitive as an eye closing, repudiating sight and being seen. When he drove away he didn’t go back to Garret’s Lane at once but chose a different route through the centre, parked somewhere by the Thames where he wasn’t supposed to, and got out of the car. He stood for twenty minutes watching the broad river slipping past on its own urgent business from bridge to bridge, its brown water oily as mud in the oblique half-light. But he wasn’t imagining throwing himself in. Something cruel and cold had come to the surface in his life, appalling and exhilarating. He could smell the river’s mineral breath, hear a rhythmic slow knocking from one of the static pontoons moored in the current.

Replacing the phone in its socket after she’d spoken to Lydia, Christine sat poised on the edge of the sofa with her knees pressed together, waiting to see how she would feel. Her knees were trembling so that perhaps she couldn’t have stood even if she’d wanted to. Of course, she was devastated. But she floated above that in her mind, observing it wryly. This humiliated her: it was as if she’d been stripped bare in public. And now everyone would have to condemn them and be horrified by what they’d done – Alex and Lydia, Lydia and Alex! Their pairing seemed suddenly so inevitable, it had been bound to happen. And Christine was bored in advance with all the sympathy she would enlist, and the outrage – she was furious with distaste at their incurring it, those two, and at the stupid necessity for emotion and action and reaction they had unloosed. What an unattractively dreary role she, Christine, would have to play – the wronged wife!

— I knew, I knew, she said, needing to reassure herself.